ART REVIEW; Imitations That Transcend Flattery

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 15, 2005

CORRECTION APPENDED

FOR more than 40 years, the artist Richard Pettibone has thought small in at least two ways. He has relentlessly produced exquisitely accurate pocket-size copies of modernist masterworks by artists from Duchamp and Brancusi to Lichtenstein and Warhol. In addition, he has seemed completely unperturbed by this apparent lack of originality. What has it gotten him? Certainly not the attention he deserves.

But redemption may be nigh. Mr. Pettibone's first full-dress retrospective is at the Institute of Contemporary Art here. Organized by Ian Berry, associate director of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and Michael Duncan, a critic and independent curator from Los Angeles, the exhibition is undeniably ambitious: 215 works spanning more than four decades of art-making.

And there are at least a couple of strains of trans-Atlantic sculpture. A series of spare, perpendicular angles extracted from the Mondrians evokes the sailboats that so many early American modernists loved to paint. More substantial are short, thin renditions of Brancusi's ''Endless Column,'' carved in rich woods and perched on Shaker table pedestals. A less direct homage to the Shakers can be seen in the impeccable Lilliputian stretchers of Mr. Pettibone's paintings; these are visible in the batches of canvases displayed in two big double-sided glass frames that evoke Duchamp's ''Large Glass'' at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Also alluded to are Picabia, late Picasso and Pound.

All this and more fits fairly comfortably into two galleries here, neither of them very large. When the show travels to the Tang in the fall and then to the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, Calif., it will probably require little more than a midsize truck. It is unlikely that so much artistic ground has ever been covered outside of an art history survey book or a museum postcard display, and probably never quite as pleasurably.

Mr. Pettibone's work has always been vulnerable to some of contemporary art's most popular pejoratives: cute, twee, teensy and craftsy; minor; unoriginal. It is also called ''art about art,'' which probably hasn't helped. It can't be said that these adjectives don't sometimes apply. But with large quantities of his work, something else prevails: formal rigor, the personalizing effects of scale and touch, faith in materials as carriers of artistic meaning and, above all, hard-nosed, even hypercritical reverence.

In addition, under cover of cuteness and pitch-perfect downsizing (note the infinitesimal nails on the plain wood strip frames), Mr. Pettibone has persistently asked some nagging questions. Who owns artistic ideas? And what have materials and craft got to do with them? What, really, is originality? Why does so much art have to be so big? And tangential to this: What is the essence of miniaturization? What happens to visual experience when previously large, famous paintings are reduced to the size of the viewer's face, while, at their best, looking mind-bogglingly like the real thing? An answer that touches on several of these questions is: A new, transformative, maybe original sense of intimacy and ownership that is unusually empowering. It is rather amazing to see art cut down to size with its integrity intact. In most cases cuteness gives way to an unsparing yet radiant sense of craft.

The plethora of works on view in Philadelphia reverberates in multiple directions through the present and the past. Combined with the labels and the show's useful catalog essays, it suggests that Mr. Pettibone's art has effectively been omitted from several oft-told histories, including those of Pop Art, Photo Realism, conceptual art and 80's appropriation art as well as the vibrant Southern California art scene of the early 1960's.

The show is also pertinent to a time when exacting duplication in sculpture and photo-based painting is a prevalent tendency, if not an overloaded bandwagon. With this show, the efforts of artists like Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Steve Wolf, Tom Friedman and Matt Johnson flash before the eyes. Not to mention Eric Doeringer, a young artist whose sidelines include making bootleg copies of works by contemporary painters and occasionally sculptors, and selling them on the streets of Chelsea.

(Mr. Pettibone's precedence has not been entirely slighted; Nature Morte, one of the most appropriation-oriented galleries of the East Village art scene's heyday, packed a 20-year survey of his work into its tiny storefront in 1987.)

Correction: August 6, 2005, Saturday
An art review in Weekend on July 15 about the Richard Pettibone retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia referred imprecisely to the genesis of his ready-made sculpture ''Bicycle Wheel, 1913.'' Although it was inspired by similar pieces by Marcel Duchamp, it is not a perfect copy of Duchamp's 1913 ''Bicycle Wheel.'' (The original of that was lost.